Chances are you’ve heard of St. Augustine even if you’ve never read anything by him. But how about St. Clement?

Few of us know this saint very well: he was an early bishop of the Church in Rome, is said to have been installed by St. Peter himself, and has been sometimes associated with the Clement mentioned by St. Paul in Philippians 4:3 as a “fellow worker” for “the cause of the Gospel.” Even if we have heard of him, few of us realize that some of what he wrote has come down to us today. Subsequently, we do not realize that his epistle to the Corinthian church (written a few decades after St. Paul’s letters to the same congregation) was considered so important by some parts of the early Church that they counted it Scripture.

The canon, of course, is closed today, and St. Clement’s letter didn’t make the cut. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can learn from this associate of St. Peter and St. Paul—this early teacher of the Christian Church.

You’d think, with credentials like that, Christians today would be lining up to hear what he had to say. And yet that’s not the case. We might run out to buy the latest book by Rob Bell, but somehow dead old authors like St. Clement and the other Church Fathers are almost entirely forgotten.

I’m not sure why that is.

It is oft noted that Christians today have little sense of the Church’s history. This criticism is most frequently levelled against Evangelicals. And, indeed, many of us do hold a rather shallow history of the Church in our heads. It goes something like this (from the New Testament on): Jesus came. Then St. Paul sent some letters and visited a bunch of places. Finally, St. John wrote the Book of Revelation. Then, sometime around 1950, Billy Graham started preaching.

Of course, Lutherans and members of the other old Protestant churches really don’t fare much better. Sure, some of us can name St. Augustine (though most of us haven’t really read much, if anything, by him). And then in the 1400s Martin Luther showed up. And John Calvin. And John Wesley. And a few other guys. But even if we could name great Christian thinkers from the Reformation on, we’d still have some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge. There’s the two to three-hundred year gap between the Apostles and Augustine, and then a thousand-year gap between Augustine and Luther. The fact is, most of us just don’t know that much of the Church’s history. And we’re especially lacking in our knowledge of the early history of the Church—the era of the “Church Fathers,” those Christian thinkers from just after the time of the Apostles who helped cement our understanding of such essential doctrines as the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

Surely what these early Christians thought is important. They wrestled with the same questions of faith and theology we do, and we can and should learn from them, just as we learn from pastors and theologians and Christian friends today. G.K. Chesterton calls this idea the “democracy of the dead”—the idea that our spiritual forebears have something to contribute to discussions of faith in our own time. Their votes matter. We might not always agree with them (in fact, they often disagreed with each other), but they are members of the same Church as us. We are together members of one body. As the hand to the foot, we cannot simply say, “I don’t need you.”

All of this explains why I was delighted—and challenged—when my fiancée approached me recently asking whether we might join an online group planning to read through the Church Fathers. This group has broken down the voluminous works of the Fathers into easy reading of a few pages a day over several years. All the works are available for free online, so there’s no cost involved—except the cost of commitment. The group also plans to facilitate ongoing discussion of the readings on their website, creating a community to encourage and teach one another as we go through the Fathers’ writings.

I’d like to challenge you to consider joining in, at least for a little while. At the very least, give the first book a shot. It’s St. Clement’s epistle to the Corinthians, and it will only take you three days to get through (reading just a few pages a day). Ever wondered what happened in the Church of Corinth after St. Paul wrote his letters? Here’s your chance to find out.

Good to hear from you! I’m glad to hear you’ll give reading the Fathers a shot. And thanks also for the word of congratulations!

Since Leah and I are going to be reading together, we’ll be going the English route. Of course, I’d do the same on my own anyhow. It’s been a number of years since I took my Greek, and it’s gotten quite rusty in the meantime. I’m currently taking a refresher course on it for that very reason.

Nice to see another confessional Lutheran joining us for “Read the Fathers.” We have a small group of us at our LCMS body here in Idaho doing this, and it is encouraging to see our Canadian brethren doing the same.

Hi A. Hayes. Yes, it sounds like a few Lutherans heard the word through my blog and are taking part (though those of us doing it in Canada are more geographically spread out). Always good to see more people getting into Church History!